October 25, 2018 (Speaker Day)

Keynote: From 60 to MicrosoftLessons about team dynamics, personal ambition, and technical leadership when acquired by one of the largest software companies on the planet.Duncan Davidson, CTO Microsoft For Startups in Berlin

Speakers

Vidya Dinamani is co-founder for ProductRebels.com where she exercises her passion for coaching product leaders, product teams and entrepreneurs. She has over 18 years of experience specializing in business & technology strategy and product design, development and management. Vidya has held multiple executive product, customer experience and technology roles at leading companies such as Intuit, Mitchell International and Deloitte. She is also an angel investor, primarily focused on software company’s. A holder of 7 US patents for software technology, Vidya earned a B.S. in Physics from Victoria University, and a Masters from Carnegie Mellon University

Fergie is a CTO disrupter focussed on root cause of problems and transformational change to organization and industry. Fergie believes there should be no sacred cow’s or processes that can’t be challenged to improve the business. Fergie’s career has spanned startups to very large corporations as a developer, manager, executive and founder.

Currently at Zeeto Fergie has delivered to customers a new SaaS platform leveraging state of the art cloud, database, micro services, streaming architecture allowing multi-tenant and cloud scale growth for Zeeto’s Ad Network. He also implemented lean software development practices that have increased productivity and quality while improving engineering team ownership.

Fergie is leading Zeeto into its technology future continuing to improve lean practices while focussing on growth, security, mobile and machine learning.

If you want to get to know Fergie best come spend time with one of his favorite activities snow skiing, mountain biking, motorcycle riding or flying sailplanes.

Adam is _not_ a Fortune 500 CEO, award-winning book author, or Nobel Prize recipient. But, he's an actor turned software engineer who co-founded ZEAL, a people-centric process-focused consulting company located around the United States. Learn more on the interwebs @CodingZeal @adamcuppy

Meetesh Karia is Chief Technology Officer at The Zebra, responsible for leadership in engineering and architecture for the company. He has an extensive history as a technical leader, having helped grow more than 70 startups as CTO at Thinktiv. Upon graduation from Duke University with degrees in Computer Science and Math, Meetesh began his career at Trilogy Software. He is one of the most highly recruited CTOs in Austin, Texas.

Meetesh holds two patents, speaks three languages and is a published author in the field of computational geometry.

Eric has been a hacker and technophile since childhood, and has always been obsessed with building cutting edge products. He's worked in almost every product role, including software developer, DevOps engineer, data scientist, project manager, product manager, and Chief Technology Officer. He's spent most of his career leading software development teams at big tech companies like Qualcomm and Sony, and has spent the last several years as CTO of a fitness tech startup, Rock My World.

Duncan Davidson is a CTO in Residence at Microsoft for Startups in Berlin. He started writing software in 1994 building some of the first online e-commerce websites. Duncan was the creator of both Tomcat and Ant and was responsible for helping donate both as open source to the Apache Software Foundation. He’s written several books published by O’Reilly Media about Objective-C development and provided technical advice for a range of startups using Ruby on Rails. The last startup he worked for was Wunderlist in Berlin.

Carlisia Pinto is a graduate of Boston University where she earned a masters degree in Computer Science. She currently works as a Senior Systems Software Engineer at Heptio, a company that empowers the enterprise to realize the full potential of Kubernetes. Carlisia works on the open source project Heptio Ark, a system for backup and disaster recovery for Kubernetes clusters. Carlisia has 15 years of experience as a software engineer and has been a resident of San Diego for the past 6 years. She also is active in the Go community, including being a co-host of the Go Time podcast.

Mick Hermiz is a fractional CTO based out of San Diego, CA. With over 25 years of professional experience in architecture, software engineering and technology operations, he has developed a robust understanding of finding the best ways in which technology can be used by a company to compete in today’s technology driven world.

Evaldas Alexander is a CTO for rankpay.com and playerline.com, both of which have been 100% remote since 2015. Over the last 10 years he has personally hired more than 250 people on Upwork and other similar websites.

Igor Mameshin is the Co-Founder & CTO of Agile Stacks, a cloud automation startup, with focus on container based and AI/ML stacks. His mission is to simplify machine learning for software developers and data scientists. Igor has 20 years of experience in the area of software development for both established companies and startups, such as SeeBeyond, Sun Microsystems, Oracle, and Accenture. Igor’s technology specialties include cloud automation, distributed system architecture, machine learning, DevOps, product & solution architecture.

Jaco has been involved in Computer and Network Security for more than 25 years. He has an Electronic Engineering background and is passionate about building products - both hardware and software. He has played the role of Project manager, Director, CEO and CTO and at present Jaco is a Senior Product Manager at Etion Limited, a South African Digital Solutions company listed on the South African Alt-X. He is also the co-founder of the South African chapter of 7CTOs.

Ryan Vice lives and hacks in Austin, TX with his family where he founded Vice Software, LLC 4 years ago with his business partner. He has 18 years experience shipping software and has spent the last 4 years heavily invested in the React ecosystem. Ryan graduated from the University of Houston with a computer science BA and a math minor. Over the years has helped many clients in an architecture role on many projects of various sizes. Ryan is very hands on and leads the charge into new technology stacks helping to create architecture patterns and best practices that maximize velocity and ROI. Ryan has also published a few books, with the last one being “Mastering React” on Packt. Ryan has been awarded Microsoft’s MVP award three times and enjoys sharing his notes and war stories with other developers at meet ups and conferences.

Alex brings a unique perspective at the intersection of machine learning, big data, and the IoT. As an undergraduate, he authored 5 peer-reviewed publications (current citation count of 117), performed DARPA-funded research in neural networks, as well as research in memory and computational diagnostics. Next he jumped into the private sector, applying analytics on some of the world’s largest data warehouses at Teradata, the pioneer in big data. In 2006 Alex co-founded Mtelligence (Mtell) to harness the deluge of sensor data in the industrial IoT, with a mission of creating a world that doesn’t break down. Mtell’s machine learning platform is used to monitor global fleets of offshore drilling rigs, railroad engines, and process equipment, in effect creating a distributed immune system to protect equipment and personnel. Alex is lead inventor on 3 patents in the area of sensor networks and machine learning. Mtell was acquired in 2016 by AspenTech (NASDAQ: AZPN), the global leader in process optimization software. Alex received degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science with a concentration in neuroscience.

Timothy Maurice Webster, Author in Brain and Brand Science

Timothy Maurice Webster is the author of four bestselling books on human and brand behavior. His research focuses on the link between Brain Power and Brand Influence. His research, talks and media work explore the evolving trends in Neuroscience and how professionals and organizations should think about how the brain processes identity, brand power and human behavior. Timothy’s work is inspired by his studies in branding, design and neuroscience from MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Sloan School of Management and Brookstone College. Timothy’s interest is in Leadership, Brand Influence and Gender Equality. He hopes to connect and engage with those who seek to expand their influence and drive greater impact.

Brant Cooper is the author of the New York Times bestseller "The Lean Entrepreneur” and CEO of Moves the Needle. With over two decades of expertise helping companies bring innovative products to market, he blends design thinking and lean methodology to ignite entrepreneurial action within large organizations. He has experienced monumental milestones such as IPO, acquisition, rapid growth, and crushing failure.He serves as a keynote speaker, advisor to entrepreneurs, accelerators, and corporate leaders, and in his current venture, Moves The Needle, empowers organizations to be closer to customers, move faster, and act bolder.

Douglas Ferguson

President, Voltage Control

Douglas is an entrepreneur and human-centered technologist with over 20 years of experience. He is president of Voltage Control, an Austin-based workshop agency that specializes in Design Sprints and innovation workshops. Prior to Voltage Control, Douglas held CTO positions at numerous Austin startups where he led product and engineering teams using agile, lean, and human-centered design principles. While CTO at Twyla, Douglas worked directly with Google Ventures running Design Sprints and now brings this experience and process to companies everywhere. Douglas is active in the Austin startup community where he serves on the board of several non-profits, mentors startups, and advises early stage ventures. Douglas spends his free time patching up modular synthesizers, playing guitar, and taking photographs. He graduated from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

Jonathan LaCour, CTO Reliam

A cloud industry veteran, Jonathan has held several technical leadership positions – most recently at DreamHost, one of the largest web hosting and cloud platform providers. As Chief Technology Officer at Reliam, Jonathan guides the development of Reliam’s platform and product. He also leads business development initiatives, and shares his expertise on current cloud trends and best practices at industry conferences and Reliam events. Jonathan has a BS degree in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology

Aaron Longwell, Principal, Longwell Consulting

Aaron has spent the last 20 years designing, shipping and maintaining distributed software systems. He is currently consulting as technical lead on projects with the U.S. Department of State to support the court and justice sectors in Afghanistan. He was previously CTO of Culture Foundry, a trusted digital partner for international brands like the Kentucky Derby and agile startups seeking technical leadership. Aaron is active in the Go community as the maintainer of several packages and supporter of the PDX Go group. Aaron spends his off-keyboard time enjoying Portland and the Pacific Northwest with his wife and two boys.

Steve Bjorg, Founder/CTO of MindTouch Inc.

Lifelong learner who is passionate about software architecture and software design patterns.

Vladimir Baranov is a Founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of AdvisorEngine. He oversees the company’s software development and technological operations. He has nearly 15 years of experience designing and building successful technology solutions.

Prior to AdvisorEngine, Vladimir was the CTO of NestEgg Wealth, a next-generation technology company that pioneered online wealth management in partnership with financial advisors. He has also served as President of Avtomat Software and has held several positions at major financial firms including Citigroup, National Bank of Canada, Tradition North America and Deutsche Bank, where he built technical solutions in Equities and Derivatives. Vladimir holds a Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science and a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering from Stony Brook University, as well as Master of Business Administration degrees from both Columbia University and the London Business School.

WHY ATTEND?

This year we extended the conference by an extra day to offer you several new experiential learning opportunities and maximum opportunity to build lasting relationships.

Expand your community

Tackle your biggest challenges

Heighten your capabilities

Sharpen your skills

Save your spot today. We expect 2018 to be a sell-out event. Get your tickets before they're gone!

0111 CTO Conference Room Block

Thank you to our sponsors & media partners

Platinum sponsor: Mission

We are Mission. An AWS managed services partner with deep know-how in launching and harnessing the power of the cloud. We passionately believe that cloud technology is the greatest business transformation tool. Not only can we architect, migrate, manage and optimize your cloud environments, but we also immerse ourselves in understanding your company’s mission, help you seize control of your cloud, and accelerate your business.